Stone Vs. Ice (September 29th, 2021)

As I struggle towards some sense of mutual understanding between me and my spouse, it’s hard to not feel the weight of discouragement. There’s so much emotion, so much apprehension packed into every crack of this crumbling wall we’ve built between each other over the past few years. We’ve traversed the same road together, but my patience is tested as I gently encourage, again and again, that she go against the deeply-ingrained instructions to always watch the road, only watch the road, never lose sight of the road; I want her to lift up her head and enjoy at least some of the same view of the majestic landscape with me. I even want to leave the road sometimes but am worried that we would lose sight of each other. She, on the other hand, is convinced that any deviation from looking at the road could result in immediate and catastrophic consequences. One wouldn’t think that it would be so difficult to simply raise their eyes to meet the view. But it is. It causes heartache. There’s a level of jealousy in me as I wonder what it would be like to not have tears shed over what type of underwear your spouse is wearing, or whether they wondered out loud whether they should try coffee for the first time. The topic can’t be breached, as it causes too much distress for one or both of us. Fourteen years of a terrific marriage, a strong marriage. Happy kids. Good times. Kind words. Meaningful experiences. And yet….I feel a tremendous sense of fragility, reinforced by messages of “you aren’t the person I married” simply due to my sheer inability to ignore the fact that my house of religion no longer has walls, and I can’t continue to pretend that they still stand. Our relationship was solid, strong, and then the weather changed. The breeze is warm and beautiful and refreshing and I haven’t felt like this…ever? Until I realize that our relationship maybe wasn’t made of stone. It's ice, and it’s melting in this new context. I don’t know what’s within it. Is it iron? Is it flimsy? Will there be anything at all with the ice gone? The worst part is that I simply cannot control the weather. It’s here. It is what it is, and I just hope the ice is simply a thin outside layer of a strong foundation. But I’ve got neighbors whose foundations were all ice, and those relationships have dissolved into the ground to leave nothing but great piles of mud where a love mansion once stood. So I’m not waiting. I’m rebuilding as the ice melts. I’m doing everything I can to reinforce that we are more than ice, that we have real structure, that we will be fine in this new weather. We don’t have to go anywhere, we can stay right here and be different than the way we were, maybe even better than the way we were. And at the end of the day, I realize that to some degree I’m just speaking to myself. And therefore we walk together, along the life road, with my arm around her. She knows I’m looking around. It makes her nervous. Occasionally she’ll glance up, but the guilt is too strong so she’ll immediately bring her gaze back to the road. Sometimes she’ll look up at me for a change, and it seems like she is okay not viewing the road if she can focus on me and not the surrounding landscape. I look forward to learning how to be more together in this, with her, somehow. Thank you for having this safe space for me to try to express it all.